Grief and rage in India: making violence against women history?

Grief and rage in India: making violence against women history?

There was uproar in India at the
brutal gang rape of a 23 year old student on her way home from the cinema. Can
we harness the international attention to this case to demand that the world's
leaders commit themselves to a policy of zero tolerance of violence against
women ?

Protestors in central New Delhi.Photo: Demotix / Jiti Chadha

This article was first published in December 2012.

When the international
community came together in 2000 to agree the eight Millennium Development Goals
(MDG) that it would prioritize over the next 15 years, it did not include the
issue of violence against women. Perhaps the problem did not appear
sufficiently important or perhaps it was hoped that progress on the
gender-related goals and targets that were
adopted – education, labour market opportunities and political representation –
would take care of the problem.

The horrific gang rape
of a 23 year old para-medic student in Delhi on 16th December 2012
suggests that such hope is misplaced. Yes, the gender gap in education in India
is closing. Yes, many more women are now in the labour force than ever before.
And yes, political quotas and reservations have increased the percentage of
women in elected office. But blocking
the transformative potential of this evidence of progress is an age-old
patriarchal system which regards women as inferior to men and its toxic
interaction with the new global culture of consumerism and its relentless
sexualisation of women’s bodies.

The young woman who
was raped had been one of the few from her village who had made it into
college, she had promising professional career ahead of her and she was the
citizen of a country with a long track record of democracy and increasing
numbers of women elected into office.
None of this was sufficient to protect her from a sexual assault the
sheer ugly brutality of which has brought thousands of horrified and grieving
protestors onto the streets across the country.

Named ‘Nirbhaya’
(‘without fear’) by some of the press who, in an unusual show of sensitivity
have not revealed her real name, the woman was returning home from the cinema
with a male friend at 9 o’clock in the evening. They boarded a bus in the
belief that it would take them closer to
home. Instead her companion was beaten badly and she was subjected to an
extended period of rape and violence that left her brutalized and unconscious.
Their naked bodies were thrown out of the moving bus to be found by passersby.
Nirbhaya recovered sufficiently to give a statement to the police but died on
the 29th December. She was named ‘fearless’ because of the fight she
put up against her attackers (she left teeth marks on at least one of their
bodies), because of her determination that her attackers be brought to justice
and because of her struggle to live, despite horrific injuries to her internal
organs.

A vigil in Delhi. Photo: Demotix / Jiti Chadha

There are a number of
reasons why I think that what is happening in India right now is important, not
only for its citizens but for the rest of South Asia. We share a great deal of
the same misogynistic culture and we all have our own shameful roll call of
women who have paid the price for it.
In Bangladesh, we remember 14 year old Yasmin, a young domestic trying
to return to her parents in the village, picked up, gang-raped and murdered by
three policemen; Seema travelling home with her boyfriend, was picked up by the
police on grounds of suspicious behaviour, put into ‘safe custody’ in the
police station where she was gang-raped
by four policemen and died a few days later; Sima, a young college student who
suffered daily sexual harassment at the hands of the hoodlums in her
neighbourhood, found no support from the police in her area and killed herself
to spare her parents further harassment.
And on the December 21st of this year, a week after the Delhi
case, a fourteen year old tribal girl was raped and killed by 3 Bengali
settlers in the Rangamati hills of Bangladesh.

In Pakistan, there is
Muktharan Mai, gang raped on the orders of council of elders in her village;
Kainat Somroo, gang raped by local village thugs at the age of 13; Naseema
Lubano, raped by the local landlord and his henchman. And in India, there is Mathura, a 16 year old tribal girl gang
raped by the police in the police station even as her relatives who had come to
file a complaint waited outside, not knowing what was happening; Bhanwari Devi,
a lower caste woman gang raped by men from the upper castes for her temerity in
challenging the practice of child marriage; Rameeza Bee, who was returning home
at night with her husband, a rickshaw puller, was picked up by the police and
raped while her husband was killed; Maya Tyagi, on her
way back from a wedding with her husband, was stopped on the road by
plainclothes policemen, stripped and paraded naked through the city bazaar and
then raped in the police station. The
list goes on, but it only names those women whose cases came to public
attention. It is the tip of a very ugly iceberg whose hidden depths we know
very little about.

A youth leader speaks at a Delhi protest.Photo: Demotix / Jiti Chadha

So the first reason
why what is happening in India right now is important for all of us in South
Asia is that, in a region where women’s movements have been fighting almost on
their own on the issue of violence against women for so many decades, the sheer
scale of the public response to the gang rape of Nirbhaya has been astonishing,
moving and inspiring. If it can lead to lasting change in India, then perhaps
it will lead to change in the rest of the region. But at the very least, it has
seared the issue into the public consciousness and put it onto the public
agenda. Certainly there have been vigils and demonstrations in solidarity with
Nirbhaya in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

The second reason is
the very visible presence of men. One of the most discouraging aspects of
women’s struggles for justice, not just in South Asia, but across the
world, has been how few and far between
have been the men prepared to stand up and be counted. Not this time. Men, mostly but not only young
men, are speaking out in the press and taking their place alongside women on
the streets. Such male support is
critical. Without it, the question of sexual violence will remain ghettoized as
a women’s issue and efforts to eradicate it remain ineffective.

There are many
theories floating around as to why, in a country with so many well publicized
incidents of violence against women, it was this case that seems to have
galvanized such large-scale public response. One theory points to the class
dynamics of the case. A great deal of the sexual violence in India is
perpetrated by men who hold positions of power against women in positions of
structural subordination: by higher caste men against women from the
‘untouchable’ castes or tribal groups;
by the police against women from poor households; by the army against
women deemed to belong to the ‘enemy’ within - women in India’s insurgency-hit
areas such as Kashmir, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and the north east region. The ferocious brutality of the attack on
Nirbhaya has revealed something frightening about the consequences of widening inequalities
in a rapidly growing, modernizing and globalizing economy. This was violence perpetrated by men from
the underclass of Delhi, men who will never share in the benefits of ‘shining’
India, against a woman who symbolized the country that India hopes to
become.

The six men in
question came from one of the squalid slum neighbourhoods of Delhi and there is
little question that, had this or something like this not happened, they would
spend their lives in the same or similar slums. The youngest of them has been
living on the streets since the age of 13. They fit the face of the image of
the rapist ‘monster’ in the public imagination in a way that rapists in the
police force, the army and the upper castes do not. According to this theory,
the scale of the response we are seeing is a manifestation of class
outrage. The rage that her rapists
enacted on the body of Nirbhaya is being met by an answering rage in those who
now call for the death penalty or chemical castration of the rapists.

But this does not
suffice to explain the demographics of the protestors, the way that the protest
appears to have broken through class and gender barriers. I think there are
different elements to such an explanation.
One element is captured by the sentiment expressed in different words by
many of the protestors: ‘That girl could have been any one of us’. What
happened to Nirbhaya could have happened to any of the thousands of young women
currently attending university. They do not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds.
Many, like Nirbhaya, come from humble backgrounds and have had to struggle to
find a place in what the new India has to offer. Many, like Nirbhaya, are the
first generation of women in their family to make it into college. In
Nirbhaya’s case, her father had to sell what little land he had in order to
make this possible. In that sense, she was ‘everywoman’ for this generation of
university students. Her very
anonymity, what one writer has called her status as ‘the unknown citizen’, has
allowed each person to see their own story in her life and death.

A second element is
captured by the fact that India, except for its cosmopolitan elite, remains a
highly gender-segregated society. Universities are one of the few places where
men and women can interact as friends, as ordinary human beings doing ordinary
things on a daily basis, something not easy to do in the highly charged nature
of gender relations in most spheres of public life. Nirbhaya went that evening
to see a film with a young man who, contrary to some newspaper reports, was a
friend, not a lover, not a fiancé. While many of the young women demonstrating
on the streets today could have been Nirbhaya, many of the men on the
demonstrations know someone like her – as daughters, sisters, friends. What
these men have learnt additionally from this case is that their presence cannot
protect their friends, sisters, and daughters from what happened to Nirbhaya.

However, while
students were the first out on the streets, and joined by women activists, many
other women from different social backgrounds began to swell their
numbers. Most women in India – in South
Asia – feel vulnerable to sexual violence. Commenting on the large scale turn
out by aam aurat, the ordinary women
of India who do not take time off from their daily lives to march and protest,the Times of India said’ At the root of
this unwonted outpouring is empathy.
Women teachers, students, shopkeepers and homemakers alike find
themselves in Nirbhaya’s shoes every day. Their privileges are few and they
chase their dreams in buses and autos, suffering a thousand
indignities...’. These women have had
to put up with being groped, leered at and often assaulted as they seek to go
about their daily business. The brutal
assault on Nirbhaya is just the extreme on this daily continuum of sexual
harassment.

In addition, there are
certain groups of women who are more vulnerable to such harassment by virtue of
their identity or the work they do: for instance, the Delhi protests were
joined by migrant women from the hill regions who come to work as domestics in
the city, a group particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment, as well as by
women activists from the north-east where the military stands accused of
molesting and raping women.

Finally, there is a
third aspect to the current response which I think holds out particular hope
for all of us in South Asia. While many
voices have been raised in India against the indifference, often collusion on
the part of politicians (quite a few of them have rape charges pending against
them), against the corruption and brutality of the police who are seen as part
of the problem rather than the solution, against the justice system that has
systematically failed the victims of rape (635 cases of rape registered in Delhi
in 2012, only one conviction) and, of course,
against the ‘monsters’, ‘beasts’ and ‘demons’ that perpetrate these
atrocities, a recurring theme in the current response is the need for serious
introspection.

The problem does not
simply lie ‘out there’, ‘the problem is us’.
There is much talk of the collective mindset that has developed in a
culture in which violence against women is not only widespread, not only
condoned, but is frequently blamed on women themselves. When Niyabhaya boarded
the bus with her companion, they were asked by one of their would-be rapists
why they were out so late in the night.
This was clearly not an expression of concern for her safety on the part
of a kindly stranger. In retrospect, it
can be seen more in the way of comment that she had only herself to blame for
what came next.

We continue to hear
the voices of misogyny speaking even as the country turns a troubled gaze
inwards and acknowledges the need for vast behavioural change at the grassroots
level. One of the most notorious
statements has came from Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of the President of India
and an elected MP who claimed that the women protesting on the streets had ‘no
contact with ground reality’ and indeed
were probably not students: ‘These pretty women, dented and painted, who come
for protests are not students. I have seen them speak on television, usually
women of this age are not students’. He
suggested that these women, who apparently frequently went to discotheques,
were holding candles and protesting as a form of fashion statement.

His comments were
slammed by many fellow MPs, disowned by his sister and later apologized for by
Mukherjee himself, but not before the Shiv Sena, an extremist Hindu party,
supported his statement, saying that he had merely said what most Indian men
were thinking anyway, only his timing had been wrong. Then there is the leader
of a caste panchayat in Haryana who declared that most rapes were fabricated,
anyway; the elected Member of the BJP party in Rajasthan who called for a ban
on skirts as a part of school uniforms as it attracted ‘sharp and dirty glances
and lewd comments’; and the opinion expressed by Khushwant Singh, one of
India’s leading writers, that rape had to be understood as the inability by men
to control their libido so that they took their lust out on unwilling women.

Nor it is only men who
subscribe to these misogynistic views.
Women too, many of them in elected office, have also expressed
them. According to Mamata Banjerjee,
Chief Minister of West Bengal, ‘rapes are happening because men and women are
interacting too freely’. Of a woman who
accepted a ride home from a pub in Calcutta and was then raped at gun point by
five men, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, leader of the party in power in West Bengal,
said, ‘That was not a rape, that was a
deal gone wrong’. Sheila Dixit, now
Chief Minister of Delhi, once said of a female journalist who was murdered in
Delhi that she should not have been so ‘adventurous’ as to be out on her own in
the night.

While well-known
Bollywood figures have joined the national protests, questions are being raised
about the role of the film industry in promoting the sexualisation of
culture. While kissing on screen is
still rare, recent articles point out that there is a long tradition of heroes
stalking, harassing and pressing their unwanted attentions on heroines but
ending up getting the girl anyway. Rape scenes too have been part of the staple
diet of Indian cinema, but becoming increasingly explicit over the years. And where once it was the lone ‘vamp’ in the
film that flaunted her sexuality while the heroine exuded virtue, the vamp
figure has all but vanished in today’s films since it is now the scantily clad
heroine who gyrates provocatively to the approval of leering crowds of
men. In a society that remains highly
segregated by gender, where sexual mores remain highly repressed, what messages
do these images communicate to men about women and what they want?

Expressions and
evidence of a misogynistic culture are so routine on the part of both men and
women, so deeply woven into the societal fabric, that it would not be possible
to exhaust even those that have surfaced since Nirbhaya’s rape and death, but
one more example is worth citing. The Hindustan Times reported on a survey
carried out among men and women using
public transport in the last week of 2012. 78% of women had been sexually
harassed in the past year: of these, over 90% reported lewd comments and
whistling; 69% reported groping and 69% reported forcible assault. 56% of the
men believed that women had to learn to tolerate some level of sexual
harassment. Similar percentages of women and men said men engaged in sexual
harassment to feel powerful ( 40% and 44% respectively) but while 35% of women
believed they did it to show off in front of their friends, only 18% of men
agreed with this statement and while 18% of women believed men ‘did it for
fun’, 30% of men agreed with this. Finally, 59% of men but just 14% of women
agreed that ‘most women invite harassment because of the way they dress and
behave’.

I have dwelt at some
length on the issue of culture and mind set because I think it is an important
reason why violence against women has proved so difficult for feminists to get
onto the public agenda. It is not clear
why this particular gang rape was the one that has provoked so much grief and
anger, but the question is whether this grief and anger can now be harnessed to
bring about sustained change in the way that violence against women is dealt
with by society. In India, there is a
serious debate going on about the kinds of measures that are likely to bring
about such change, but the problem of violence against women, within the home
and outside it, is not unique to India nor indeed to South Asia. It occurs in all countries, though some
countries deal with it more effectively than others.

We are now looking
ahead to the post-MDG era and discussions are taking place in various forums as
to what the priority goals should be for the next phase. There are many new and
burning issues jostling for attention: climate change and growing global
inequalities, for example. But why can
we not now at last turn our attention to an old problem that will not go away?
Making zero tolerance on violence against women a central platform in post-MDG
agenda would have, at the very least, a powerful symbolic impact. Given the
long-standing culture of silence that surrounds violence against women, the
fear and shame that so often silences its victims, the belief that it is men’s
prerogative to beat their wives, that women invite rape by their clothes and
demeanour, a clear and uncompromising statement that such beliefs and behaviour
will no longer be tolerated will help to show the problem for what it is: the
denial of dignity and bodily integrity to half of humanity. For that statement
to carry weight, it has to be made by those with the mandate and power to make
change happen. If the world’s leaders
who came together in 2015 to discuss the post-MDG agenda committed themselves
collectively, loudly and clearly to a policy of zero tolerance and put in place
the enforcement mechanisms that demonstrated the seriousness of their
commitment, women’s rights activists across the world might finally be able to
shame their governments into action.
And if that happens, that as yet unnamed young woman whose terrible fate
shook her country out of its apathy towards its female citizens may do the same
thing for women in the rest of the world.

Naila Kabeer is Professor of Development Studies at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, London. She has been engaged in teaching,
researching and policy advocacy in the field of gender and development
for over 25 years. She is the author of Reversed Realities: gender hierarchies in development thought (Verso, 1994) and The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka (Verso, 2000[37]).

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